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The Game of Contacts(Heavy drug users: Curitiba, Brazil)

The game of contacts data were collected as nested items in a behavioral
surveillance study of heavy drug users in Curitiba, Brazil.
This larger behavioral surveillance study was conducted by the
Brazilian Ministry of Health and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation as part
of the 10-city Brazilian Behavioral Surveillance Study of heavy drug
users (Bastos, 2009).

The game of contacts data enables researchers to estimate the network
composition and social visibility of groups. These estimates may be of
intrinsic interest or may be used to adjust estimates of the sizes
of hard-to-count populations made using the network scale-up method.
For additional information about the game of contacts
see Salganik et al. (2011).

Data Release

This public data release includes two data files on 294 respondents
in comma separated values (CSV) format, 13 R programs, data documentation,
and a copy of the interviewer form (in Portuguese) to record the game
of contacts data. By running the R programs, one can reproduce all the
graphical and tabular results as reported in Salganik et al. (2011).

References

Salganik, M.J., Mello, M.B., Abdo, A.H., Bertoni, N., Fazito, D., and Bastos,
F.I. (2011) "The Game of Contacts: Estimating the Social Visibility of Groups."
Social Networks Vol.33 No.1, pp.70-78. Available for access, if permitted,
at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2010.10.006.

Funding

This research was supported by The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS),
the Brazilian Ministry of Health, the U.S. National Science Foundation (CNS-0905086),
and the U.S. National Institutes of Health/NICHD (R01HD062366). Any errors are the
responsibility of the authors not the funding agencies.